The World Wide Web (“the Web”) is a system for publishing information, in which users may use a web browser application to retrieve information, such as web pages, from web servers and display it.
The Web has increasingly become a medium used to shop for products. Indeed, thousands and thousands of different products—as well as other items such as service contracts—may be purchased on the Web. A user who plans to purchase an item on the Web can visit the web site of a web merchant that sells the item, view information about the item, give an instruction to purchase the item, and provide information needed to complete the purchase, such as payment and shipping information.
It is typical for a user to view information about a product on an “item detail page.” The information provided on an item detail page may include such information as the item's name and source, a picture of the item, a description of the item, reviews or ratings of the item, a price at which the item is offered for sale, and a control—such as a button—that may be activated by the user to order the item from the web merchant.
In many senses, shopping at web merchants is significantly more compelling for shoppers than shopping at physical merchants. As one example, a shopper that is looking for the best price on a particular item may visit a number of different web merchants that carry the item in order to compare their prices. This process is made even more convenient by the use of a variety of shopping bots which the user may access in order to obtain the results of a price survey of a large number of web merchants.
This ability of shoppers to compare prices makes pricing among web merchants extremely competitive. A web merchant that sets its price for an item just a few percent above the prevailing low price may find it difficult to sell many units of the item.
For this reason, successful web merchants must invest significant effort and/or capital in researching and analyzing the prices being charged by other merchants for the items that it sells. This may involve such measures as hiring a significant number of employees to manually track down the price being charged for different items by various web vendors; building complicated automated systems to perform this research; or buying the results of such research at substantial prices from third-party research services. In addition, to use the results of any of these different techniques for researching competitive prices, they must be organized and presented in a manner that helps facilitate setting the web merchant's prices, which can also require substantial effort and/or expense.
In view of the foregoing, more efficient and reliable approaches to obtaining and presenting competitive pricing information would have significant utility.